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Preserving Fragile Memories of Genius

LONDON — There are several stainless steel ashtrays in each room, positioned wherever he might have left a cigarette to smolder while greeting visitors or chatting to his assistants. Like everything else in the studio of the great Italian designer Achille Castiglioni, those ashtrays are still placed exactly where they were on his last working day there in 2002. Even the mirror by his desk remains at the same angle, one that enabled him to watch what was going on, without leaving his chair.

Since Castiglioni’s death, his family has preserved the contents of the studio, on the ground floor of an 18th-century palazzo near Parco Sempione in Milan, to present as vivid a picture as possible of what it was like during the 58 years that he worked there. But the family has faced a financial struggle to keep the studio museum open. A charitable foundation has been formed to run it, but it still needs to raise funds to cover the running costs.

Another museum with a historically important design collection is in a far graver plight. The Wedgwood Museum in the English village of Barlaston, Staffordshire, is locked in a legal battle to prevent the enforced sale of its entire collection, which includes many of the most influential pieces developed by Josiah Wedgwood, the pioneering industrialist who founded his eponymous ceramics company in 1759, as well his letters, books and records of his scientific experiments. The threatened sale was triggered by the company’s insolvency.

At a time when governments across Europe are imposing severe cuts on cultural funding, the possibility of securing public support for design heritage projects is significantly reduced. Recessionary pressures are also making it harder to attract funding from alternative sources, such as the corporate sector and wealthy design enthusiasts. In the current economic climate, it would be very difficult to finance the restoration of a building like E.1027, the modernist house built by the Irish architect and designer Eileen Gray in the late 1920s on the cliffs near Roquebrune in southern France. Fortunately, the renovation work there began before the recession bit, and E.1027 is scheduled to reopen this autumn, after lying derelict for years.

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A Japanese-style tea ceremony at the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, California, in 1951. Some of the guests included, from left, Charles Eames; Shirley Yamaguchi; Charlie Chaplin, and Ray Eames, behind Chaplin.Credit
Eames Office

As anyone who has ever tried to raise funds for heritage projects will attest, it is always fiendishly difficult. But it is particularly challenging in a field like design, whose cultural credentials are relatively new, compared to more established disciplines such as painting, sculpture, music and literature.

There are fewer charitable foundations that fund it, and fewer wealthy museums that are interested in acquiring design collections, or to supporting them financially. Similarly, design projects are not necessarily eligible for grants from publicly funded heritage bodies.

If you then consider how high the odds are against a decent design archive being assembled in the first place, and preserved for posterity, it seems remarkable that any of them survive.

Not every designer wants to collect their own work; and those who do may not be able to afford to store it. Even Josiah Wedgwood procrastinated for years before starting his archive.

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Charles and Ray Eames built this house in the late 1940s in a meadow in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. Credit
Eames Office

“I have often wished I had saved a single specimen of all the new articles I have made, and would now give twenty times the original value for such a collection,” he wrote to his business partner Thomas Bentley in 1774. “For ten years past I have omitted doing this, because I did not begin it ten years sooner. I am now, from thinking, and talking a little more upon this subject, resolved to make a beginning.”

Once the archiving process begins, there is always a risk of the contents being damaged, say, by fire or flooding, and of important pieces disappearing through theft or because the designer has to sell them.

After the designer dies, the story often becomes even more soap operatic, depending on who inherits the estate, whether the heirs get on with each other, and, critically, on their personal finances.

When the Italian designer Carlo Mollino died in 1973 with no obvious heirs, his design studio was dismantled and most of its contents disappeared. The Italian gallerists Fulvio and Napoleone Ferrari have since restored an apartment in Turin that he used for photography, and opened it as a private museum.

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The studio of the Italian designer Achille Castiglioni. Since his death, his family has preserved the contents of the studio, on the ground floor of an 18th-century palazzo near Parco Sempione in Milan, to present as vivid a picture as possible of what it was like during the 58 years that he worked there.Credit
Studio Museum Achille Castiglioni

Other designers have taken pains to safeguard their cultural legacies. The Japanese-American designer Isamu Noguchi ensured that his archive would be protected by setting up a private foundation to manage both it and the Noguchi Museum, which he built in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens in New York, and opened in 1985, three years before his death.

Similarly, the Eames family was determined to conserve the house that the American designers Charles and his wife Ray Eames had built for themselves in the late 1940s on a meadow in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. The family established a nonprofit foundation to run it.

“Our mom, Lucia Eames, Charles’s daughter, realized the only way to save the house was to create the foundation,” explained her son Eames Demetrios, who is the foundation’s chairman. “The house is on three acres overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and if we had sold it, it would have been turned into condominiums.”

The running costs of the Eames House are now funded partly by the Eames design company and partly by Vitra and Hermann Miller, the manufacturers of their furniture. The foundation also organizes fund-raising events to cover additional costs, such as a $1.5 million restoration program. On March 10, the foundation will stage a recreation of a Japanese tea ceremony held in the Eames House in 1951 with Noguchi and Charlie Chaplin among the guests. Tickets will cost $5,000 for each guest.

The Castiglioni family now faces the challenge of securing funds for its new foundation, while the Wedgwood Museum is continuing the fight to save its collection. If it fails, some of Josiah Wedgwood’s greatest design feats, including pieces of the sumptuous Green Frog dinner service commissioned by Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, in 1773, could be sold to the highest bidders.